Stability first!

[Peter Mangold]

Hi all,

with the 2018.11 release I had to experience a decrease of stability during my work in the past days.

I faced several crashes e.g. after recording a vocal track and after saving my project, etc...

I did not see such stability issues for a long time. Anybody else with similar experiences?

I use W7 64bit with a Focusrite Clarett USB interface.

Best regards, Peter

[Feral State Sound]

1 hour ago, Peter Mangold said:

Hi all,

with the 2018.11 release I had to experience a decrease of stability during my work in the past days.

I faced several crashes e.g. after recording a vocal track and after saving my project, etc...

I did not see such stability issues for a long time. Anybody else with similar experiences?

I use W7 64bit with a Focusrite Clarett USB interface.

Best regards, Peter

I am not experimenting crashes but more audio dropouts and a weird bug (reported) that make tracks invisible sometimes.

[John Vere]

Stability is tied to W10. Your on your own when using W7.   

I use both and definitely have stability issues with my W7 version.  

ANd one of them is that crash after save I used to get on both W7 and W10. For me now W10 is rock solid. But my Laptop is licenced to W7 and I'm to cheap to pay for the upgrade  

[Peter Mangold]

9 hours ago, John Vere said:

Stability is tied to W10. Your on your own when using W7.   

I use both and definitely have stability issues with my W7 version.  

ANd one of them is that crash after save I used to get on both W7 and W10. For me now W10 is rock solid. But my Laptop is licenced to W7 and I'm to cheap to pay for the upgrade  

Hi John, thanks for your feedback.

This is  actually the first time I read such a strong recommendation to upgrade to W10, especially with respect to stability.

Also the earlier versions of the software since 2018.10 were very stable on W7. Do you think they do not test on W7 any longer?

[Phil The Fleshdemon]

I use W10 and it's running better than it has since bandlab started taking over. I'm so happy they are making it better with each update.

[scook]

4 hours ago, Peter Mangold said:

Also the earlier versions of the software since 2018.10 were very stable on W7. Do you think they do not test on W7 any longer?

AFAIK, the shift to development on Win10 happened a couple of years ago. Testing on Win7 has decreased ever since. I am not sure how much Win7 testing happens today.  While CbB may run on Win7, the recommended OS is Win10.

[John Vere]

I do believe I remember Noel posting about this and hopefully they might chime in. It was about a few things they did that make Cakewalk fully integrated to W10.  I think they spend NO time worrying about backwards compatibility.  You must remember this is free software and they are no longer focusing on how to "sell" it. So why waste resources tweaking code for W7. 

Better things happen when we move forward and for me it's a noticeable difference. I often have my W7 laptop sitting beside my W10 Desktop system.  I've been recording screen captures on it for a tutorial for my band mate and son in Law who are just diving in. The W7 machine is noticeably slower to respond even though it's specs are close and both use SSD OS and DATA drives.  On the Laptop I get random freeze ups and crashes for no reason. They never happen on the W10 machine. I don't think my W10 system has crashed since last spring> And I have it on line a rule I never used to break.

The laptop is even more optimized for recording as I don't use it for anything else.  Latency Monitor shows better performance for the Laptop so go figure.  

It's not a deal breaker and what I do is save more often.  But the answer to your OP is CbB is Very stable if running on an modern up to date machine. 

I might just spring for the upgrade to W10 on the Laptop but as it's not my main DAW I would rather spend that money on a new guitar ! 

[GIM Productions]

Hi all,last update is awesome,perfect with big prj too.

Many thanks to the CbB staff!

 

[Steev]

I highly recommend staying current and upgrading to Win 10. Unfortunately the longer you wait, the farther behind you get which basically translate to you are very quickly becoming obsolete, and the more obsolete you get, the more expensive it's going to be to catch up.

  Sometimes Newer computers and newer hardware components are needed to run new a OS.

 Drag your feet too long in any one of those areas, one day you will wake up and realize, OMG Windows 10 isn't not only a new OS anymore, it's no longer free anymore. It's the age old condition of "all things must past."

 And so it should also be assumed that even though sometimes, without a doubt, the "best things in life are free.."... Certain conditions must be met, and these conditions are never constant and are never free for ever..... Because the only constants are...…. "Nothing lasts forever" and "And all things must pass.."

But until than, I highly recommend rolling back to you last known stable release of SONAR, and make your music and have fun.

forget about keeping up with newer, better, faster, and smoother technologies that rely on the newer, better, faster, and smoother computer/hardware technologies that Windows 10 relies on to be clearly the best most stable release of Windows I've ever had the good fortune to run since Windows 2000.

 I still have a "working" 600 m/Hz Pentium 4 with 96 MB of RAM ancient Dell Inspiron laptop  running Windows 2000 with SONAR 8.5, Sonic Foundry ACID Pro 4, and Sound Forge 4.5 that runs better then the day I bought it new.

 The reason for that is when I bought it, it came with Windows 98 SE and only 32 MB of memory. 

Upgrading to Win 2000 and upping memory to 96 MB turned it into a fire breathing dragon of the day. ?

 Today I have a 3 year old Samsung Galaxy J3 (2016) smart phone that can outperform it seven ways to Sunday 10x over, and the J3 is considered not only old, but rather wimpy compared to a new Galaxy S.

 And that would be a pretty close comparison to what Cakewalk by Bandlab can do compared to a x32 version of what Win 7 can do with SONAR.? The difference is nothing short of ELECTRIFYING.

 Not so electrifying if you are running an x64 version of Win 7, but much MUCH better in a shockingly pleasant in a very welcome sort of way..

 It's hard to describe in words, it has to be experienced to be understood, because everything just seems to work stably,  smoother and perform better.

 And all too often we only notice when things don't.. ?

[Noel Borthwick]

We do only the minimal testing on Win7. None of the development staff use it anymore so its only tested in a virtual machine.
Microsoft isn't fixing issues either other than security updates which will also stop soon.

Please upgrade to Win10 if you want the best CbB experience. Its vastly improved for audio despite what some might believe. WASAPI, Bluetooth, the scheduler as well as codec support are greatly improved in Win10.

[scook]

1 minute ago, Noel Borthwick said:

We do only the minimal testing on Win10 Win7. None of the development staff use it anymore so its only tested in a virtual machine.

Please upgrade to Win10 if you want the best CbB experience.

fixed

[Noel Borthwick]

1 minute ago, scook said:

fixed

Doh that might be a problem

[abacab]

Windows 7 is nearing end of life and end of support from Microsoft.  So best to prepare for that eventuality, just like with Win XP and Vista.

In addition to my Win 10 DAW, I still have a laptop that runs Windows XP and Sonar 8.5.  They work well together because that release of Sonar was currently supported on XP.  

Consider that if you prefer to run an older OS, that it's best to stick with DAW software that was developed on that OS.  It would be ideal if things just worked forever, but the realities of the OS internals affect application function and performance as the OS evolves over time.

Developers likely switched to Win 10 as their main development platform a couple of years ago. So if you want to run the latest applications, you are in a better position for testing and support if you also run the latest OS.

[Peter Mangold]

Thank you all for your comments!

I think migrating my music PC to W10 is now an option I am thinking about. But this is a decision that needs some more thought... I would love to invest in a new Hardware which would be the natural way of upgrading the OS. But this Christmas it is not on the wishlist...

I wish everybody a mary Christmas and a great start in 2019 with a lot of music!

Peter

 

[Peter Mangold]

15 minutes ago, Peter Mangold said:

Thank you all for your comments!

I think migrating my music PC to W10 is now an option I am thinking about. But this is a decision that needs some more thought... I would love to invest in a new Hardware which would be the natural way of upgrading the OS. But this Christmas it is not on the wishlist...

I wish everybody a mary Christmas and a great start in 2019 with a lot of music!

Peter

 

MERRY Christmas...?

[John]

I don't think you need to worry much about your hardware working with Windows 10.  The only thing to really consider is does your hardware have windows 10 drivers. 

If it does you can upgrade for almost nothing if you are thoughtful  about finding the best deal. 

[Phil The Fleshdemon]

I jumped on Windows 10 when it launched and I can say it's better than it has ever been, updates don't take hours anymore.. that was the worst part about the older W10 but the updates we get now are typically fast and easy. (in my own experience at least)

[Starship Krupa]

4 hours ago, John said:

I don't think you need to worry much about your hardware working with Windows 10.  The only thing to really consider is does your hardware have windows 10 drivers. 

If it does you can upgrade for almost nothing if you are thoughtful  about finding the best deal. 

Better than almost! I just upgraded both my main DAW system and my notebook from Windows 7 to Windows 10 for free using this guide:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-upgrade/

And I have to say, I'm not as impressed as everyone else seems to be about Windows 10's performance.

With the main DAW, it seems to be about like it was before performance-wise, so it's kinda what's the big deal, but with the notebook, it seems more sluggish.

The notebook is getting a bit long in the tooth, but it's well within the specs for running both Windows 10 and Cakewalk. It's an i5 dual core 2.67GHz, and I upgraded the RAM from 4 to 8 for the occasion. The HD is 7200RPM. Graphics drivers are the latest from nVidia. I'm planning on getting an SSD or SSHD for it in the near future to try to get a couple more years out of it. Kinda underwhelmed by Windows 10 on the notebook.

The first computer around here that I put Windows 10 on was my older Gateway Q6600 Core 2 Quad with 8G of RAM and it's still a happy camper, Runs Cakewalk just fine. The difference with it was that I put a hand-me-down 125G SSD in it as its C drive when I rebuilt it as a Windows 10 system. This makes me think that Windows 10 might be more reliant on a fast boot/system disk than 7. I dunno.

[abacab]

Windows 10 really whips the llama's butt on an SSD.  

But not so much on my laptop with a spinning drive. 

Highly recommend running Win 10 on an SSD.

[Steev]

2 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Better than almost! I just upgraded both my main DAW system and my notebook from Windows 7 to Windows 10 for free using this guide:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-upgrade/

And I have to say, I'm not as impressed as everyone else seems to be about Windows 10's performance.

With the main DAW, it seems to be about like it was before performance-wise, so it's kinda what's the big deal, but with the notebook, it seems more sluggish.

The notebook is getting a bit long in the tooth, but it's well within the specs for running both Windows 10 and Cakewalk. It's an i5 dual core 2.67GHz, and I upgraded the RAM from 4 to 8 for the occasion. The HD is 7200RPM. Graphics drivers are the latest from nVidia. I'm planning on getting an SSD or SSHD for it in the near future to try to get a couple more years out of it. Kinda underwhelmed by Windows 10 on the notebook.

The first computer around here that I put Windows 10 on was my older Gateway Q6600 Core 2 Quad with 8G of RAM and it's still a happy camper, Runs Cakewalk just fine. The difference with it was that I put a hand-me-down 125G SSD in it as its C drive when I rebuilt it as a Windows 10 system. This makes me think that Windows 10 might be more reliant on a fast boot/system disk than 7. I dunno.

When I first updated from 7 to 10 it seemed to slow my system down a tad at first changed my configuration settings from high performance mode giving preference to apps (SPLAT) to standard power sharing load balancing for Windows, changed my default media player from Windows Media Player to Groove Music and some other crappy media player for video, blah, blah, blah, constant notifications and Cortana trying to make friends and figure out what's on my mind.

 After selecting WMP back as my media player shutting all that stuff down things got immediately smoother and far less distracting.

If you just recently upgraded from 7 to 10 give it some time to straighten itself out and finish analyzing and tweaking your system, work habits and updating everything, and you will notice a performance difference soon enough after it stops nearly constantly sending boot records to One Drive, system and configurations settings and such through telemetry reporting back and forth to the Microsoft Mothership and constantly updating in the background.

 The updating and analyzing processes can take a lot longer if you keep using and tweaking your computer and shutting it down every time you're not using it.. Windows update services try not to be intrusive while your working, but usually aren't always too good at it at first.

A couple of days to a week (depending on Internet service, age and quality of modem/wireless connection) of letting it run constantly 24/7 and rebooting it at least once a day should speed up the process.

 Boot times and performance improve drastically after all that stuff is done.

 And Noooo, contrary to many conspiracy theorists, Microsoft enforcing security updates is really a good thing, and they're not trying to steal your identity or suck out soul.